Wednesday, July 21, 2010

If you're just joining us after reading the interview, welcome. If you're ATOTB regulars, feel free to go on and check the interview out.

Although the blogosphere is fairly immune to the summer rerun syndrome, occasionally we will mention older posts in our equivalent of a clip-show. Considering the autobiographical content available in the interview, I thought it a good time to try some blog biography.

In the beginning, there was Gene. Gene posted all by himself for about a year. The blog was a lot more free-form back then, mainly documenting his home brew journey and mad scientist projects. While we still do both those things, the blog has become much more.

In March this year, Gene invited me (Nick) to write with him on this blog. We go way back, having been neighbors and friends for many years. Hi all. We quickly used Blogger In Draft to update the layout and were rolling along.

As we became more regular (and no, I'm not talking about raisin bran,) we started attracting what at the time seemed like decent traffic. Gene's Knick Knack Paddy Whack post actually got him a free sample of the Newcastle Draught Keg, and I got a decent amount of comments on my review of Coastal Wheat.

Things were going well, until... KABLAM!!! All our posts were deleted on Friday April 23rd. Whether this was a glitch that affected only our blog, or somebody maliciously deleted our posts, ATOTB was wiped out. The tragedy was averted however, since I subscribed to my own feed in Google reader (which saves a copy.) I was able to quickly whip up a program to restore the blog, sans-comments.

If I didn't have enough reasons to believe in karma before, on Monday May 3rd, little over a week after being obliterated, we were named Google's Blog of Note. We were floored by the amount of traffic being generated and all the nice people who left comments on our posts.